Literature and history, the two largest fields in the humanities, now give significant attention to worldwide dimensions of their disciplines. This volume, with five essays by world literary scholars and five by world/global historians, explores issues that criss-cross the contested terrain of globalization. Historian Neilesh Bose, the leader in assembling this productive exchange, saw the benefits in focusing the book on India—long a nexus of global discourse and institutional diversity— without abandoning the subcontinent's heritage of area-studies analysis. The result brings a fresh look at the global, with a wealth of materials.

The volume draws on two centuries of Indian writing in global literature and history—a nexus of global thought from numerous perspectives. For scholars in India as elsewhere, a core concern within the two expanding disciplines is contemporary globalization, with its social and environmental transformations and crises. At the same time, authors and critics in both fields are expanding the scope of their work along temporal, spatial, and topical axes. Attention to topics beyond elite dominance creates space for such issues as the lives of commoners, the complexities of gender, the significance of ancient antecedents, assumptions on human agency, and the limits of nature. Each of the resulting perspectives necessarily entails challenges to the priorities of others, so that a growing range of issues now contends for space in the understanding of the global.